The strangest weirdest most inexplicable article I may have ever read

It is also perhaps the most depressing article I may ever have read. It is almost impossible to summarise in a way that explains how bizarre it is. It comes in four parts. I will highlight what I think matters first and then give you the link.

Part I – I read with great interest and approval all of the MSM and as much of it as I can find

I’m a political junkie. Every day I read The Washington Post and The New York Times, among other media giants, with great interest and appreciation. I understand and value the great writing, thoughtful analysis, logic and reasoning. And the fact checking. Especially the fact checking.

Given that I live in Iowa, The Des Moines Register, The Chicago Tribune and The Kansas City Star are among my favorites as well. I also try to catch a variety of broadcast news organizations over the course of the evening. Being ADD, Twitter presents an endless buffet of delightful and distracting news commentary and stories.

I’m learning that President Donald Trump continues to offend, make missteps, court World War III and faces isolation in the face of the worst presidential polling in history. That he faces possible impeachment, or removal from office when his cabinet invokes Section 25 of the Constitution. I learn that the Republican Party is in disarray and may never recover. In this chaos commentators are speculating just how many Democrats will gain seats in the House and Senate and if it will be enough to take over one or both bodies of Congress in 2018. Possible Democratic candidates for president are being vetted for 2020.

Part II – Even at the request of a friend I could not bear to watch a speech given by Trump but I did manage to read it

My friend Mark said something like, “Hey Bob, if you want to understand why rural conservatives like Trump, watch the speech he gave at the Values Voters Summit.”

I replied, “Just tell me why,” not wanting to tell Mark I can hardly stand to watch or listen to Trump, I despise him so. I thought, how perfectly ironic and hypocritical of the religious right to have a man without honor or dignity preach about “values.”

“No, you have to watch it first. Then we’ll talk,” he said. . . .

While I couldn’t bring myself to actually watch Trump give his speech, I read the transcript as provided by the White House.

Part III – I read the speech and can see what Trump voters like

Doing my best to understand how my conservative friends might read Trump’s speech, I read it again. Only this time, I contrasted Trump’s messaging with how rural conservatives often view Democratic messaging. Here goes.

Trump began by saying we are a nation of believers and that “together we are strengthened and sustained by the power of prayer.” Democrats want prayer out of the public sphere.

Trump called the Las Vegas shooting a “horrific mass murder” and an “act of pure evil.” Democrats blame the guns and want to take yours away.

Trump honored the heroes of Las Vegas, including the police officers and other first responders. Democrats elevate thugs and view our protectors in blue with disdain.

Trump says, “We respect our great American flag.” Democrats take a knee.

I could go on. There’s much, much more in Trump’s speech that’s fodder for conservative thought.

Part IV – I therefore warn all my comrades that these Trump supporters are so stupid that if the Dems think they are going to ever get their votes they are wasting their time

So, big media, keep up the great writing, thoughtful analysis, logic and reasoning. And fact checking. But, remember here in Trumplandia, you won’t change any minds. The cultural fissure is too deep, and relates to fundamentally different worldviews with respect to freedom and the nature of man.

Given so, Trump’s sinking poll numbers are irrelevant. My conservative friends will vote for a fence post before they vote for a Democrat.

Keep preaching to the choir, coastal media elites. Continue to predict the downfall of Trump in 2020 if not before, and great victories for Democrats in congressional races in 2018, and we’ll see if it works. That’s my hope. I fear, however, such stories will only lead to complacency among the Democratic electorate.

My conservative friends remain “Trump-strong.”

And this moron, what does he remain? Read it all: They’re Trump-strong in rural Iowa — and not changing their minds. It is unimaginable what would need to happen for someone as smug and dense as he is to even understand what might possibly be wrong with the way he thinks. But at least he is ahead of me on this: I cannot even now conceive why anyone would have preferred Hillary and could not possibly provide a list in the same way he has done on how someone on the left sees the world.

“I’m a committed Democrat. But, right now, the Democrat positions and tactics are insane, and Trump, no matter how much I dislike him, is doing and saying things that the majority of Americans want to see done and said.

“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.” Bill Bryson’s famous opening to Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America created a generation of imitators among dullards in the writing business, the latest of which is Robert Leonard, the smartarse Democrat who wrote the article Steve cites.

Leonard’s shtick is simple: “Look at me! I live among all these bogan hick rednecks in Small Town America who aren’t intelligent enough to appreciate the wisdom of the coastal elites I adore whose dicks I suck harder than a Harvey Weinstein starlet.”

He swallows the fact-free propaganda being peddled by the New York Times without a clue that he’s just a useful ruling class idiot being used as cannon fodder by Big Media.

His only glimmer of self-awareness is in recognising Trump voters have principles and aren’t buying the fake news and 24/7 propaganda being used to try to bring him down. Do a Google search on Robert Leonard in a year’s time and this’ll still be number one — 15 minutes of fame for a nobody going nowhere.

Great article.
Well written and full of little digs at the elitist swine who deign to rule over us.
“Keep preaching to the choir, coastal media elites.”
Also managed to out knee jerk reactionaries half a globe away who immediately go critical at anyone who isn’t from their own political tribe.

“More is now required of us than to put down our thoughts in writing,” declaimed Jeff Flake in his oration against President Trump, just before he announced he will be quitting the Senate.

Though he had lifted the title of his August anti-Trump polemic, “Conscience of a Conservative,” from Barry Goldwater, Jeff Flake is no Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater took on the GOP establishment in the primaries, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, defiantly declared, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” and then went down to defeat battling to the end after the assassination of JFK made LBJ invincible.

The real “Mr. Conservative” was a true profile in courage.

Flake, with only 18 percent approval in Arizona, decided to pack it in rather than get waxed in his own primary. With Falstaff, Flake appears to believe that “discretion is the better part of valor.”

Sen. Bob Corker is another summertime soldier calling on colleagues to stand and fight Trump while he retires to Tennessee.

It’s no wonder the establishment is viewed with such derision.

Flake calls Trump “dangerous to our democracy.” But the real threat Trump represents is to the GOP establishment’s control of the party’s agenda and the party’s destiny.

U.S. politics have indeed been coarsened, with Trump playing a lead role. Yet, beneath the savagery of the uncivil war in the party lies more than personal insults and personality clashes.

This is a struggle about policy, about the future. And Trump is president because he read the party and the country right, while the Bush-McCain Republican establishment had lost touch with both.

How could the Beltway GOP not see that its defining policies — open borders, amnesty, free trade globalism, compulsive military intervention in foreign lands for ideological ends — were alienating its coalition?

What had a quarter century of Bushite free trade produced?

About $12 trillion in trade deficits, $4 trillion with China alone, a loss of 55,000 plants and 6 million manufacturing jobs.

We imported goods “Made in China,” while exporting our future.

U.S. elites made China great again, to where Beijing is now challenging our strategic position and presence in Asia.

Could Republicans not see the factories shutting down, or not understand why workers’ wages had failed to rise for decades?

What did the democracy crusades “to end tyranny in our world” accomplish?

Thousands of U.S. dead, tens of thousands of wounded, trillions of dollars sunk, and a Mideast awash in blood from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, with millions uprooted and homeless. Yet, still, the GOP establishment has not repudiated the mindset that produced this.

With the Cold War over for a quarter of a century, what is the case now for America, $20 trillion in debt, going abroad in search of monsters to destroy?

Consider. Bush-Obama “open borders” brought in tens of millions of Third World peoples, legally and illegally, to rising resistance from Americans forced to bear the economic and social costs.

What was the GOP establishment’s reply to the opposition to amnesty for illegals and calls for a moratorium on legal immigration, to assimilate the tens of millions already here?

To call them nativists and parade their moral superiority.

Flake and Corker are being beatified by the Beltway elites, and George W. Bush and John McCain celebrated for their denunciations of Trumpism.

Yet no two people are more responsible for the blunders of the post-Cold War era than McCain and Bush.

About which of half a dozen wars were they right?

Yesterday’s New York Times recognized Trump’s triumph:

“Despite the fervor of President Trump’s Republican opponents, the president’s brand of hard-edged nationalism — with its gut-level cultural appeals and hard lines on trade and immigration — is taking root within his adopted party.”

Moreover, a new question arises:

Can the GOP establishment believe that if Trump falls, or they bring him down, they will inherit the estate and be welcomed home like the Prodigal Son? Do they believe their old agenda of open borders, amnesty, free trade globalism and democracy-crusading can become America’s agenda again?

Trumpism is not a detour, after which we can all get back on the interstate to the New World Order.

For though unpleasant, it is not unfair to say that if there was one desire common to Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump voters, it was be rid of the regime resting on top of all of us.

Should Trump fall, and a restored establishment attempt to reimpose the old policies, there will be a truly uncivil war in this country.

After the Trumpian revolt, there is no going back. As that most American of writers, Thomas Wolfe, put it, “You can’t go home again.”

Traditionalists have been told that for years. Now it’s the turn of the GOP establishment to learn the truth as well.

Goldwater lost badly, but the establishment that abandoned him never had its patrimony restored. It was the leaders they abhorred, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, to whom the future belonged.

I contrasted Trump’s messaging with how rural conservatives often view Democratic messaging.

The cultural fissure is too deep, and relates to fundamentally different worldviews with respect to freedom and the nature of man. … My conservative friends will vote for a fence post before they vote for a Democrat.

Keep preaching to the choir…the downfall of Trump in 2020 if not before, and great victories for Democrats in congressional races in 2018, and we’ll see if it works. That’s my hope.

You should read some of your own posts, Steve.
(I was going to say ‘re-read’ but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt).

Comments are closed.

Liberty Quote

Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellowcitizens. Even a beggar does not depend upon it entirely. The charity of well-disposed people, indeed, supplies him with the whole fund of his subsistence.